“He wasn’t,” says Ghost. “Not now anyways. But I always noticed when we were in the Catholic shelter he knew the words to all the prayers.” Freddy nods in agreement. “He sometimes even said something in Latin to the priests.” He finishes his beer and looks at me expectantly. I pull a twenty from my wallet and hand it over. “Get another round for you and Freddy,” I tell him.
“Thanks, Rocky. D’ja want another one yerself?” I shake my head and he makes his way to the bar.
Gently, I place the Bible back in the box and take out the other item. It’s a memory card, identical to the one in my camera. I wonder why this was so valuable to Wily that it’s in the same box as his Bible. I’ll take a look at it later. Maybe there’ll be some photographs which might give a clue to his death. I can feel the tingle that goes with a new case and that old desire to solve it before my former colleagues in VPD can. Stammo wouldn’t approve.
When Ghost gets back with the refills, I ask them both, “What did you guys know about Wily’s life before you met him?”
“Not much,” says Freddy.
“You know what it’s like on the streets, Rocky,” adds Ghost. “You don’t ask too many questions. But I can tell you this: Wily was a very clever guy. He never made a big deal of it but he’d read a lot in his time. Knew a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, and he was great at math,” chimes in Freddy. “I think he knew a lot about computers too. Sometimes when he’d had a few drinks he’d talk about artificial intelligence and stuff like that. None of us could understand what he was saying but he’d go on about it for hours.” He smiles fondly at the memory.
“Is it OK with you guys if I hold onto this stuff for a while? Now we know his name, assuming he’s the Denis Lamarche whose name’s on the front page, I should be able to track down his sister Annie and at least I can give her his Bible. I’m sure she’ll want to give him a decent funeral too. There can’t be that many Annie Larmaches working for the Federal government in Ottawa.” As I say the name, it rings a bell, I’m just not sure where from but it gives me an uneasy feeling.
The Kingston is an anomaly. It is a pink, four-floor, boutique hotel which has been handed down through generations of the same Irish family for a hundred years. It is surrounded on three sides by the Telus Garden development, to whom the family stubbornly refused to sell out—much to the great pleasure of many Vancouverites who are watching the face of our downtown core changing, not always for the better.
The Kingston’s Taphouse could not be more different from the Balmoral. The carved wooden bar is elegant without being pretentious, spoiled only by the television screens—broadcasting talking heads still going on about the Ottawa terrorist attack—which cover up some of the ornate carving. The planks on the floor are rough, the clientele are smooth and, with its fine selection of beer, it is a favourite hangout of mine.
I’m enjoying an excellent Four Winds IPA at the bar while I wait for Susan Grey to arrive. The good news is that I was able to avoid the lure of the downtown east side’s heroin dealers and I have been able to push down the pangs of my heroin-yearning; the bad news is that since my meeting with Ghost and Freddy, I’ve spent the afternoon having no luck in tracking down my missing rich guy. I’ve talked to his two closest friends and visited a number of his favourite haunts, all to no avail.
“Hello stranger, can I take this seat?” There is laughter in Susan’s voice that lightens my crushing mood.
She sits and orders a Martini, brought quickly by a barman who really knows his stuff.
After the initial banter, I ask the question I hope will start the ball rolling. “So, tell me what’s been happening with you for the last quarter century.”
“Oh my God. Is it that long? I feel so old.”
“You look fantastic,” I say, the words coming out of my mouth without thought.
She grins. “You look pretty good yourself.”
I gesture towards her left hand. “I see you’re married now.”
“Yes. Ten years. He’s a wonderful guy.” She seems sincere and I’m feeling pretty sure in my bet with Stammo that she is not being unfaithful to Etienne Grey.
“Great husband, great job, still looking twenty years old. Seems like you have the perfect life,” I say.
For an instant, there is a flicker of uncertainty in her face but she pushes it away with another smile. “Pretty much,” she says.
“For a moment there you looked uncertain,” I say.
“No, no. I was just thinking about something at the office,” she lies. I know it. And she knows I know it. She changes the subject and asks about my life.
As I tell her, I know that I’m not going to learn her secret this evening.
I’m going to have to put plan B into action. Starting tomorrow night. Wednesday. The night her husband says she’s often out.
Nick
Wednesday
The pain is hammering away in my head. I don’t know if it’s lack of sleep, too much Jim Beam or the dread of what I have to do next. But a promise is a promise. Especially one you make with yourself. The chat with my lawyer yesterday afternoon helped. It all seemed easy then but now that I’m faced with having to do it, it’s not going to be easy at all. I hope he gets in before Adry; I don’t want her to see it if it gets nasty.
I hear the office door open and he walks in. He looks like hell on wheels. “Are you OK?”
“Yes and no. I haven’t had a hit since midday on Monday and the pain is pretty bad.”
“I’ve got some Extra Strength Tylenol in my desk. Will that help?”
“Can’t hurt.”
He follows me into the main office and to my desk. He dry-swallows three of the pills. “It’s going to be bad for a few days,” he says, “but I’ll get through it somehow. I’m sorry, Nick.”
“Yeah… well…” I bite my lip for a bit. “I’ll tell you the truth Rogan. When we started this business, I made a promise to myself that if you ever started using again, I’d close the business down and start up on my own. I talked to my lawyer yesterday and told him to prepare the papers.”
We lock eyes. The silence is so deep you could hear a mosquito fart. He doesn’t say a word. I feel like a judge about to pass sentence. I take a deep breath. “I’ll hold off, just so long as you stay clean and start going to meetings.”
He breathes out a deep sigh. “Thanks Nick,” I can see tears forming in his eyes. “I won’t let you down. I promise.”
“Good,” I grunt. I can feel my own eyes prickling. “Good.” I look away and open up my computer.
“’Morning men.” Adry’s in.
She walks into the main office with a Tim Horton’s bag. “Doughnuts,” she says, dropping them on my desk. “I’ll get the coffees.” She breezes through into the little kitchen area and returns with three steaming cups.
Time for ‘morning prayers’.
5
Cal
I’ve been a bit distracted during the morning meeting. I can’t keep out of my head the thought that Stammo was about to shut down the business. A part of me is angry about it but, in the main, I am just awash in shame. I can’t stand the thought that I might have destroyed the company I’ve come to love. Stammo glared at me in the early part of the meeting because I was on my phone but I was searching for a meeting; there’s one at twelve fifteen today and I’m going to be there, not just for the sake of the business but for Ellie. I can’t get the image from Insite out of my mind, the image of her watching me fix up, and if Sam knew, she’d probably—
“Cal!”
“Sorry, what?”
“Your update on the Susan Grey case?”
I tell them about my meeting at the Kingston Taphouse and my plans for this evening.
“Right. Meeting over, let’s get after it.” This is Nick’s new end-of-meeting phrase; he picked it up from CNN, I think.
“There’s one other thing,” I say. “The homeless guy who was beaten to death. I fou
nd out his name. It was Denis Lamarche. I want to track down his sister Annie. She works for the Feds in Ottawa. Could you see if you can get a phone number for her Adry?”
“Sure, no prob.”
“Just don’t spend too much time on it,” Stammo growls, “it’s a pro bono job.”
Adry chuckles at him. “OK Mr. Grumpy. I’ll check for Anne, both spellings, and Anna too. How do you spell the last name?”
“It’s Lamarche. L-A-M—”
“What did you say?” Stammo interrupts. “Lamarche?”
“Yeah, Ann—“
“There was an Annalise Lamarche who was one of the victims of that terrorist attack in Ottawa last week.”
Stunned silence reigns for a moment.
“Denis Lamarche’s body was found on Thursday,” I say.
“If it’s the sister, what are the chances they’d both die violent deaths on the same day?” Adry asks quietly.
“Slim to none,” I reply.
This time it’s Stammo who breaks the second silence.
“I don’t believe in coincidences.”
Over the twitchiness and pain of withdrawal, I feel that tingle in my gut: the special thrill that comes when you get a break in a case.
“I’ll be right back,” I say as I rush from the office.
Still out of breath from my dash down to the car and back, I place the box on my desk. I take out the memory card. “Denis Lamarche hid this under the tent he lived in at Oppenheimer Park. I was wondering if there were any pictures on it that might give a clue as to how he died.”
Stammo takes it. “Well let’s take a look.”
He opens a drawer in his desk and takes out the company’s camera: an item that we thought would be essential to running a private investigation firm; an item which, until now, we’ve never used. He powers it up and slides in the memory card. He taps a few buttons. “Huh,” he grunts.
“What is it?” Adry and I say in unison.
He taps a few more buttons. And a few more.
He turns the camera around so we can see what’s on the screen.
It’s blank.
“So there’s nothing on it,” I can’t keep the disappointment out of my voice.
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“There are no pictures on it,” he says.
“That’s what I said. There’s nothing on it.”
“No. There may be no pictures on it but that’s not nothing,” he’s using his annoying, patronizing voice.
“It’s a camera’s memory card,” I’m using my annoyed, exasperated voice. “What else could be on it?”
“Watch and learn,” he says, a favourite expression of his.
He slides the card out of the camera, slowly puts the camera back in its bag and, equally slowly, puts the bag back in his desk. He’s doing it to annoy me and succeeding admirably.
He wheels over to the cabinet where we keep our office supplies; on the bottom shelf are the computer supplies and a bunch of accessories and cables. He calls Adry over. “Behind that box of ink cartridges there’s a small yellow box. Can you get it for me please?” Again I think about the frustration he must feel at being unable to do some of the simplest things. And I think about the guilt I feel because he’s in that chair.
He wheels back to the desk with the yellow box in hand. He takes out a white plastic gizmo with slots of various sizes on the top and a cable coming out the side. He plugs the cable into his computer and slides the memory card into one of the slots.
Adry and I move around behind his desk and each of us peers over one of his shoulders. In a couple of clicks, we are looking at a folder with two files in it. One is named ‘docs’ and the other is ‘hint’. Stammo double-clicks on the ‘docs’ file. A window pops open and it is filled with gobbledegook. There are letters and numbers but mainly it is a bunch of squiggles and odd characters.
“What the hell is that?” I ask.
“I don’t know. It’s some sort of file. Maybe a WORD doc.”
He tries to open the file with WORD but that doesn’t work either.
“What about the other file, ‘hint’,” Adry suggests.
Stammo double clicks the other file.
Ten words appear on the screen: ‘garter is the key. you’ll know what it means annie’.
Stammo snorts. “Well Annie may know what that means but I don’t.”
“Garter?” says Adry. “Well the obvious thing is a little snake you find in the garden. The other is a garter belt, you know, one of those elastic things women used to wear to hold their stockings up.”
“Yeah,” says Stammo, “but what we’ve gotta remember is that Denis Lamarche was an alcoholic living on the streets. This might all be nothing, just a bunch of raving.”
“Just because he was an alcoholic doesn’t mean it’s all nonsense,” Adry says.
“Doesn’t mean it makes sense though…”
As they bicker on like the old married couple they’re not, I stare at the words on the screen: ‘garter is the key. you’ll know what it means annie’. I say it over in my mind. I say it different ways, putting different emphases on different words. Nothing. Denis and Annalise were from Québec. I’d say it in French except that I don’t know the French word for garter, neither snake nor belt. Nothing. I look at each word individually. The. Key. Is. Garter. Hmmm. Key? Then it comes: the memory of another case.
“Can you copy those files onto a thumb drive?” I ask.
“Sure.” He pulls a thumb drive out of his desk and pops it in his computer. After a few clicks, he pulls it out and hands it to me.
“I’ll be back later,” I say as I head to the door.
“Wait a minute, Rogan.” Stammo’s voice stops me in my stride. “You’ve just discovered that the brother of a terror-attack victim was killed on the same day as she was. Don’t you think we should, I dunno… what?… maybe call it in to the RCMP?”
I ignore the sarcasm dripping from his jaws. “Good idea. Call it in to their counter-terrorism unit. Just don’t send them the files yet.”
I’m out the door before he can object.
Damien Crotty and I were unlikely friends in high school. He was a Goth and I was a nerd but we bonded over a book we both loved. Now he’s a millionaire techie and I’m a thousandaire PI. He runs a very successful computer security company that does, among other things, testing the computer security of his clients by trying to hack into their systems.
He’s wearing jeans and a t-shirt which says, Free will: the persistent illusion that we have any control over the choices we make. Somehow he is one of those people who can make jeans and a t-shirt look like a fashion statement.
“Thanks for seeing me on such short notice, I really appreciate it.”
“No prob. It’s great to see you. What’s up?”
I hand him the thumb drive. “There’s a file on that drive that I think might be encrypted. I was wondering if you could find out what’s in it.”
He grins as he plugs it into the laptop on his desk. “You’re not asking much.” He stares at the screen. “Well first thing, there’s no malware on the thumb drive. That’s a good start.” He does a couple of clicks. “I’d say you’re probably right that it’s encrypted. Do you have the key?”
“Look in the file called ‘hint’,” I say.
“Hmm. ‘Garter is the key.’ Not too likely.” He taps away for about twenty seconds. “Nope. As I thought, the word garter is not the encryption key for this file.”
“The guy who I think encrypted it was québécois, maybe it’s the French word for garter.”
He types away for a bit longer. “Garter is jarretière.” Type, type. “Garter snake is couleuvre.” Type, type. “Nope. Neither of those work. Normally, keys are a lot longer than six letters. You should ask the ‘annie’ mentioned in the ‘hint’ file. She may know.”
“I wish I could but she’s dead.”
“Oh… Sorry to hear that.”
<
br /> “Is there any way that you could decrypt it without the key?” I ask.
“Brute force decryption? I could try but don’t hold your breath.” He types away for a minute or so. In the silence, I feel the withdrawal pains in my body biting down. “OK. I’ve sent it to one of our servers to try but as I say…” He shrugs his shoulders.
He pulls the thumb drive out of his computer and hands it to me. “I was planning an early lunch. Do you want to join me?”
“I’d really love to but I’ve got an appointment I dare not miss.”
He promises to let his computers keep working on the decryption and that he’ll call me if they succeed, then we say our goodbyes and I think ruefully of the lunch I’m missing. It would be infinitely preferable to where I’m heading right now.
“My name’s Cal and I’m an addict.” It’s a while since I’ve said those words. They make me feel bad and good at the same time. I look at my watch. “It’s forty-seven and a half hours since my last fix.” As I tell them my story, I look across the crowd. They are typical of the usual crowd at an NA meeting: there are a couple of well-dressed businessmen; a group of three younger guys who look like they might be in some high-tech company; a handful of homeless men, one of whom I can smell from where I’m standing. There are only two women: one is a short blonde who looks like she’s someone’s much-beloved grandma and the other is a striking south asian woman, casually well-dressed. The crowd may be diverse but this room is special. We are all exactly equal here. We are all addicts. For some reason, I think of Damien’s t-shirt. Free will: the persistent illusion that we have any control over the choices we make. How can that be true? It starts to bug me and I fumble over what I was saying. I apologize and continue with my story, telling the part about when I started using again after Em’s death. As I speak, I notice the south asian woman is looking at me intently. She has one of those stares that seems to look into one’s soul. Yet there is both sympathy and humour in her eyes.
Cal Rogan Mysteries, Books 4, 5 & 6 (Box Set) Page 27
